Introduction

Alongside the Radeon R9 280X and R9 270X, AMD launched its entry-level Radeon R7 260X graphics card fit for visually-intensive desktops with some mild gaming thrown into the mix. The specifications of the R9 280X and R9 270X may dwarf those of the R7 260X, yet it deserves to be taken seriously from an academic standpoint. The graphics core inside the SoC that drives the Microsoft Xbox One entertainment system isn't all that different from the Radeon R7 260X, at least on paper.

Priced at $139, the Radeon R7 260X makes building gaming-ready desktops under $400 possible. It succeeds either the Radeon HD 7670 or the HD 7770, depending on how you interpret AMD's new nomenclature. The R9 290 series will succeed the HD 7900 series in the product stack. The R9 280 series succeeds the HD 7800 series (sub-$300 class) and the R9 270 series succeeds the HD 7700 series (sub-$200 class). But such an arbitrary product stack repositioning would create unreal price-performance increments at the points AMD's various HD 7000 series products launched, which is why AMD tweaked pricing a little to give buyers a different and equally valid way of looking at AMD’s new product stack by using price points.

As with the other two GPUs launched by AMD today, the Radeon R7 260X isn't based on any new silicon. It has quite a few things in common with the Radeon HD 7790 launched just this March, but differs from the HD 7790 by running higher clock speeds and double the standard memory amount. Its GPU core is clocked at 1100 MHz (compared to the 1000 MHz on the HD 7790) and memory runs at a scorching 1625 MHz (6.50 GT/s effective), which yields over 100 GB/s of memory bandwidth on even this relatively narrow 128-bit wide memory bus. The bandwidth is then comparable to what GDDR5-enabled GPUs with 256-bit wide interfaces managed before the 4 GT/s GDDR5 era. The other big difference is in its memory amount: it is now at 2 GB as opposed to the 1 GB on the HD 7790. Based on the 28 nm "Bonaire" silicon, the Radeon R7 260X features 896 stream processors based on the Graphics CoreNext architecture, 56 texture memory units (TMUs), and 16 raster operations units (ROPs).

In this review, we put an AMD Radeon R7 260X reference design through its paces.